About Us

Mission & Values

The mission of Lake County Public Library is to be a partner in building community, fostering life-long learning, providing equal access to information and promoting diversity of ideas.

We are committed to:

Meeting the needs of our diverse community

Supporting the intellectual growth of our community

Protecting patrons’ privacy and freedom to read

Providing a space for the community to come together

Strategic Plan

Strategic Planning 2019 -2020

This Winter and Spring the staff of Lake County Public Library carried out a number of information gathering sessions with patrons and partners to help us determine how we will develop the library’s collections, services, and programs in the next year. We chose to focus on just the next year to help us be more nimble and to have the ability to respond to the needs of individual patrons and our community. In March of 2020 we will evaluate our success in meeting the goals we have set.

We are excited to implement these goals and look forward to the year ahead.

Sincerely,
Brena Smith
Director

Themes

In the process of collecting information for our strategic plan a number of themes emerged that apply to all parts of our planning process. We will keep these themes in mind as we move the library forward:

Partnerships

We have developed many valuable partnerships throughout the Lake County community. We will continue to develop these essential relationships, and to collaborate with our partners to develop the library's programs, services, and collections

Taking care of what we have while we move into the future

As we build and look into the future, we will work to ensure that we are preserving the collections and programming that has been important to the community and library staff.

Professional Development

We will seek to continually refresh and expand our knowledge through professional development opportunities in order to stay current, provide excellent services, and continue to grow the library.

Bringing community together

The library has always been a meeting place where community can come together, and we will work to ensure this remains an essential component of our mission.

Refresh

We will endeavor to be in a constant state of refresh - always evaluating our collections, programs, services, and space.

Contributing to problem-solving issues throughout the county

We are a reflection of our community and consider ourselves a partner in problem-solving issues that are important to Lake County.

Revenue

There is concern in the community regarding long-term tax revenue issues and our ability to sustain resources for Lake County residents. Therefore, we will keep in mind the history of boom and bust economy in Lake County, and will provide consistently excellent services in good and bad budget years.

Feedback

We will continue gathering feedback and information from our community in order to provide the high quality services, collections, and programs that have been identified as most important to our patrons.

Strategic Initiatives

Programming and Services

Engaging our community through programming is a top priority for the library. Through programming we provide patrons opportunities to learn, make community connections, and engage with our collections. Programming also provides an opportunity for us to partner with other organizations to collaborate in meeting the community’s needs.

We will create a long-term programming plan for all ages and groups, while also seeking grants to support pilot programs. Additionally, we will be planning and partnering with BOOST (Better Out Of School Time) to provide programming to Lake County School District students for the 2019-2020 school year when they begin Friday’s off.

Programming areas and topics

Life skills

Hunting & gun safety

STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math)

Literacy

Entertainment

Cultural

Gardening

Food access

Community Engagement (programs led by library staff outside of the library)

Spanish Services & Collections

Residents who speak Spanish as a primary or secondary language make up nearly half of the population of Lake County. As part of our mission of inclusivity and meeting the needs of diverse communities, we will continue to develop relevant collections and services for Spanish speakers. We will also develop bilingual services and collections to encourage language diversity in our community. We are currently planning new programming for children and adults, and expanding existing programming as staff allows. Our goal is to add at least one additional bilingual staff member by the middle of 2019.

Bilingual programming and service

Bilingual storytime

Citizenship resources

Services for English Language Learners

Space

Lake County is a growing community and the library will grow and evolve with it. Based on current and planned development projects, Lake County will likely see a 20% population growth over the next 10 years. Further, Our building is close to 50 years old, and while it has served this community well, it no longer meets our needs. With these two things in mind as we plan for the future, we will begin long term planning by initiating a feasibility study for a new building. Alongside efforts to look to the future, we will also look at ways to maximize and refresh our current space.

Local History

Programs, Services, and Collections for our local history collection are critical components of LCPL. Local history programs are well attended and researchers come to use our resources from around the country and world. Our Colorado Mountain History Collection (CMHC) is not only unique for its subject coverage, but many of the objects and documents are rare and our maintenance of the collection contributes to the preservation of local history. We also maintain an extensive digital collection which contributes to the preservation of materials and provides access to users from anywhere in the world.

Over the next year we will be evaluating our current Collection Development and Digitization Plan and make necessary adjustments; a priority for our collection is to continue developing our Oral History Program. We will also begin evaluating our preservations needs for the physical collections.